ok... to fix your xbox your gonna need to open your case... I know most wont want to do this because it voids your warranty but since you have deleted you ms dashboard you already have voided it so... you have nothing to lose! If your still on board the next step is to open your xbox with TorX 10 and 20 screw drivers. You can find them at a local hardware store or check your power drill bits you might have them. Ok now you need to remove all the pads on the bottom of your xbox ( there in the four corners) and the silver sticker. Use the TorX 10 to remove these screws. Then pull of the top of the xbox (if all the screws are out it should lift up with no effort). Now there will be two drives. on the left will be the dvd-rom and the left the HDD. remove the screw in the middle and pick up the black HDD holder on each side will be a screw remove both. No disconnect the cables (be carefull but rough lol. ok you removed your HDD! YaY! ok now we need to make an xbox iso HDD maker. You will need a dvd burner. shutdown your PC and remove all drives except for a drive that contains your OS and is bootable. This drive should be set as secondary master (use jumper). Insert your xbox tools disk and turn on your PC. You can skip any harddrive detection that your bios does, as it will not correctly detect the xbox drive. Once you are at a DOS prompt run the following tool from your bootdisk: atapwd.exe The program should detect your two drives and you should notice that the xbox drive is flashing (if not refresh the list using the shortcut displayed). Also check out the SELFXV and notice that the xbox drive has a few more + signs then the normal PC drive. In the next steps we will unlock the drive (the L column) and then disable drive locking (the E column) on the drive which in turn will make those two columns display “–“ signs. Press ESC to exit the program. Next run the following program from the xbox tools disk: hdunlock.exe Here is will display a list of drives where you can choose which one you wish to unlock. Usually the xbox drive will be choice 1, but verify that that is correct. If so press one to select the xbox drive. Now you will be asked to enter the key the program will use to unlock the drive. Enter in the key that we printed in step 2. Remember you should not enter in “:”’s or any trailing 00’s in the key. An example key will look will end up looking like: 112233445566778899aabbccddeeff When you press enter it should pause for a moment and then say “done”. To verify that the unlock key worked correctly run the file: atapwd.exe. You should see under the L column of the drive there is now a “-“ sign meaning the drive is unlocked. If for some reason it still has a “+” under it you did not successfully unlock the drive and you should start over from step 2. For those of us who did it correct the first time, we now need to disable the locking on the drive so when we restart it doesn’t relock. Run the following program from the xbox tools disk: hddisabl.exe This should bring up a similar selection menu where you can pick the xbox drive. Just choose choice 1 (or the one that you believe is your xbox drive). Then you will have to enter the xbox drive key again. When finished it should say “done” again. Verify that you disabled locking by running: atapwd.exe. Under the “E” column you should now see a “-“ sign meaning you disabled locking of the drive. now stick the HDD back in your xbox and run. You wont ever have an unmodded xbox again but at last its playable! Check out this site for more xbox info and tutorials! http://www.consolekalman.com
well thanks.. but before i do all of that could i just softmod my xbox.. then once it`s softmodded i can lock the hdd.. would softmodding it work